A couple weeks ago, we had a kerfuffle here on Hackaday: A writer put out a piece with AI-generated headline art. It was, honestly, pretty good, but it was also subject to all of the usual horrors that get generated along the way. If you have played around with any of the image generators you know the AI-art uncanny style, where it looks good enough at first glance, but then you notice limbs in the wrong place if you look hard enough. We replaced it shortly after an editor noticed.
The story is that the writer couldn’t find any nice visuals to go with the blog post, with was about encoding data in QR codes and printing them out for storage. This is a problem we have frequently here, actually. When people write up a code hack, for instance, there’s usually just no good image to go along with it. Our writers have to get creative. In this case, he tossed it off to Stable Diffusion.
Some commenters were afraid that this meant that we were outsourcing work from our fantastic, and very human, art director Joe Kim, whose trademark style you’ve seen on many of our longer-form original articles. Of course we’re not! He’s a genius, and when we tell him we need some art about topics ranging from refining cobalt to Wimshurst machines to generate static electricity, he comes through. I think that all of us probably have wanted to make a poster out of one or more of his headline art pieces. Joe is a treasure.
But for our daily blog posts, which cover your works, we usually just use a picture of the project. We can’t ask Joe to make ten pieces of art per day, and we never have. At least as far as Hackaday is concerned, AI-generated art is just as good as finding some cleared-for-use clip art out there, right?
Except it’s not. There is a lot of uncertainty about the data that the algorithms are trained on, whether the copyright of the original artists was respected or needed to be, ethically or legally. Some people even worry that the whole thing is going to bring about the end of Art. (They worried about this at the introduction of the camera as well.) But then there’s also the extra limbs, and AI-generated art’s cliche styles, which we fear will get old and boring after we’re all saturated with them.
So we’re not using AI-generated art as a policy for now, but that’s not to say that we don’t see both the benefits and the risks. We’re not Luddites, after all, but we are also in favor of artists getting paid for their work, and of respect for the commons when people copyleft license their images. We’re very interested to see how this all plays out in the future, but for now, we’re sitting on the sidelines. Sorry if that means more headlines with colorful code!
Clearly labeled, and the courts sort out the copyright issue (it can be trained on legally acquired art).
Concur. Any license issue/court fight should be directed at the company that created and trained the AI, not the end user that wrote a prompt.
HAD’s stance is very conservative and nice to artists though.
Never met an artist that didn’t steal.
They steal inspiration.
They steal style.
They steal ______ to make ______.
Of course this is an exaggeration, except when it isn’t.
People quite literally don’t know where they get things from, and then when they analyze it they start getting offended with AI getting things in the same manner.
I’ve got so many things I’d like to attach some art to, and I don’t have the thousands of dollars it takes to pay an artist to do it. And, most artists suck at contract work.
“Good artists copy, great artists steal.” – Pablo Picasso
I for one am very comfortable using AI tool to create content, just as long as it meets standards and is both proofed, and meets some standards. I get the hate, but it’s not going away as a tool, and I embrace it fully, and use AI in a lot of my toolchains these days.
I do however have a strong distaste when clearly hastily slapped together content from poorly trained AI’s s published on sites without human oversight and proof reading / editing to improve it. It’s just laziness and makes the case against AI so much easier for the haters
Being in the UK I think we may have stumbled into “two countries divided by a common language” territory here!
Nothing was mentioned about the great damage AI does on the environment as energy consumption and electronic waste goes.
Also, I don’t understand this “both sides has equal weight” conclusion. Does the morals of using AI outweigh the little economic benefit? do we suddenly have a shortage of artists and a huge need for cheap art that for this technology to be justified?
And consider all the horses put out of work by the automobile!
I think that it’s wrong for companies to use software to steal even a small amount from everyone–in an effort to put more people out of work. AI is after your dreamjobs.
Should we open the debate a little further and debase it a touch by querying regarding unlabeled, but clearly, AI generated articles that haven’t been very well proofed by the author pre-sumbission (or indeed after..)? Cos I’ve definitely had that feeling twice in the last year from articles that had rather glaring errors in their phrasing and style
That’s funny; because I’ve found AI to make less of those mistakes.
I’ve found the left doing it though, because their political points are more important than their subject matter.
Personally, I’ve been using LLM’s locally on my devices for around a year or so now, and I assure you, a lot of them are utterly trash without good training and proofing after. Currently, I’d have a hard time distinguishing the output if it’s tuned with the correct prompts pre generation on the models I’m happiest with. That said, there’s still a lot of “free” models that run online that are literally just people hosting untrained LLM’s and rakiing in ad fees from having it open, that don’t care to improve the base model they’re using
I appreciate HaD transparency on this…. issue (for some). I am justifiably offended by AI’s statistical fuzziness, and its potential for bullying, harrasment and dishonesty. Further it strangles an already difficult job landscape for many practical and creative professionals. Finally, the corporations championing this new fuzz-mind have no regard for environmentap concerns, legal liability, and copyright infringment. If we consume and grow these companies by feeding on their AI drip, they will inevatibly enshitify the product and leave a collapsed market in the wake of their upheavals.